Malcolm Wilson

W. B. Grove's British Rust Funghi, first published by Cambridge University Press in 1913, had long been the standard work on the subject. But it had grown increasingly obsolete in the light of the intensive research devoted to the group. As early as 1938, Dr Wilson, who was reader in Mycology at Edinburg University, was encouraged to prepare a new edition. Since then it became clear that what was needed was not a revision but an entirely new book. This was three-quarters complete in 1960, when Dr Wilson's illness and death again brought it to a halt. His colleague Dr Douglas Henderson then undertook full responsibility, completing the text and redrawing all the figures. This book was published in 1966 and is now being reissued. It covers all the species of Uredinales or Rust Fungi known in Britain at the time of publication and takes into account extensive research.

In the first full-length study in any modern language dedicated to the Meteorologica, Malcolm Wilson presents a groundbreaking interpretation of Aristotle's natural philosophy. Divided into two parts, the book first addresses general philosophical and scientific issues by placing the treatise in a diachronic frame comprising Aristotle's predecessors and in a synchronic frame comprising his other physical works. It argues that Aristotle thought of meteorological phenomena as intermediary or 'dualizing' between the cosmos as a whole and the manifold world of terrestrial animals. Engaging with the best current literature on Aristotle's theories of science and metaphysics, Wilson focuses on issues of aetiology, teleology and the structure and unity of science. The second half of the book illustrates Aristotle's principal concerns in a section-by-section treatment of the meteorological phenomena and provides solutions to many of the problems that have been raised since the time of the ancient commentators.

In the first full-length study in any modern language dedicated to the Meteorologica, Malcolm Wilson presents a groundbreaking interpretation of Aristotle's natural philosophy. Divided into two parts, the book first addresses general philosophical and scientific issues by placing the treatise in a diachronic frame comprising Aristotle's predecessors and in a synchronic frame comprising his other physical works. It argues that Aristotle thought of meteorological phenomena as intermediary or 'dualizing' between the cosmos as a whole and the manifold world of terrestrial animals. Engaging with the best current literature on Aristotle's theories of science and metaphysics, Wilson focuses on issues of aetiology, teleology and the structure and unity of science. The second half of the book illustrates Aristotle's principal concerns in a section-by-section treatment of the meteorological phenomena and provides solutions to many of the problems that have been raised since the time of the ancient commentators.

Aristotle was the first philosopher to provide a theory of autonomous scientific disciplines and the systematic connections between those disciplines. This book presents the first comprehensive treatment of these systematic connections: analogy, focality, and cumulation. Wilson appeals to these systematic connections in order to reconcile Aristotle's narrow theory of the subject-genus (described in the Posterior Analytics in terms of essential definitional connections among terms) with the more expansive conception found in Aristotle's scientific practice. These connections, all variations on the notion of abstraction, allow for the more expansive subject-genus, and in turn are based on concepts fundamental to the Posterior Analytics. Wilson thus treats the connections in their relation to Aristotle's theory of science and shows how they arise from his doctrine of abstraction. The effect of the argument is to place the connections, which are traditionally viewed as marginal, at the centre of Aristotle's theory of science. The scholarly work of the last decade has argued that the Posterior Analytics is essential for an understanding of Aristotle's scientific practice. Wilson's book, while grounded in this research, extends its discoveries to the problems of the conditions for the unity of scientific disciplines.